Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age

This is a history of the “Luddite revolution,” when textile laborers in central English destroyed machinery that was very rapidly taking their jobs. It’s where the general term “luddite” came from, meaning someone who refuses to adopt new technology.

I was surprised to find out that this all took place over a very short period of time, in a specific geographic location. It all happened from about 1811 to 1813 in the rural areas about Notthingham (a happy coincidence that this is where the fable of Robin Hood was also set). The action was quite condensed, but furious for those two years.

A band of textile workers loosely organized until the “command” of “Ned Ludd,” who was likely not a real person. They broke into textile factories and destroyed machines called “frames” (or maybe that was a part of the machine?). They did this because their livelihood was being completely obviated by these machines.

Several people died in the process – the factory owners began fortifying their factories and leaving armed guards there overnight. And as the Luddites were caught, many of them were sentenced to death and hanged.

The author is quite sympathetic to the plight of the workers, and explains how the only way of life – and, in many cases, the foundation of their communities – was being wiped out, leaving them completely adrift. Wages dropped through the floor, and many workers, families, and entire towns were forced into abject poverty. The situation was ripe for revolution.

But the violence eventually petered out, likely because there was just no stopping the advance of the machines. As they were destroyed in Nottingham, they were being built in London and bigger cities, and they were spreading all over the country (and, one imagines, the world). It likely dawned on the Luddites that their war was simply unwinnable.

At the end, the author provides some “lessons” from the Luddites:

1. Technologies and never neutral, and some are hurtful
2. Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destorying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain
3. “Only people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.”
4. The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, wall always come to its aid and defense, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual
5. But resistance to the industrial system ,based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary
6. Politically, resistance to industrialism must force not only the “the machine question” but the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate
7. Philosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embedded in an analysis – an ideology, perhaps – that is morally informed, carefully articulated, and widely shared
8. If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which there may be space for alternative societies to arise

Clearly, this is some level of Left-win idealism (the author is a bit of a radical). Sadly, of course, any discussion of “morals” will wilt in the face of capitalism.

(See: The Human Connection and the Lack of Corporate Morality)

The book was written in 1995. I’d be fascinated to know how the author feels today, in the face of AI and other automation (he’s 87 now).